Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (68 page)

A relative of Depository superintendent Roy Truly recently told researchers that due to intimidation by federal authorities, Truly was fearful
until his death. Truly's wife, Mildred, still refuses to discuss the
assassination-even with family members.

Sandy Speaker, the supervisor of Warren Commission star witness
Howard Brennan, would not discuss the assassination until recently, after
getting a phone call from his friend and co-worker A. J. Millican. Speaker
said he got a call from Millican early in 1964. Millican was almost in tears
and told him never to talk about the assassination. Millican said he had just
received an anonymous call threatening not only his life, but the lives of
his wife and her sister. He said the caller told him to warn Speaker to keep
his mouth shut.

Recently Speaker told this author:

That call really shook me up because Millican was a former boxing
champ of the Pacific fleet. He was a scrapper, a fighter. But he was
obviously scared to death. And I still don't understand how they got my
name because I was never interviewed by the FBI, the Secret Service,
the police or anyone. They must be pretty powerful to have found out
about me.

Whispered rumors, anonymous phone calls, and freakish "accidents"
combined to create a tangible aura of fear in Dallas in the weeks following
the assassination. Some of that fear still lingers there.

One of the most puzzling aspects of the post-assassination confusion
involves encounters between Dealey Plaza witnesses and "Secret Service"
agents.

The most noted incident of this type was recounted by Dallas police man Joe M. Smith. Smith had run into the parking lot atop the Grassy
Knoll after a woman had told him, "They're shooting the President from
the bushes!" While searching through the parked cars, he encountered a
man who displayed Secret Service identification. Smith told author Anthony Summers:

The man, this character, produces credentials from his hip pocket which
showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before,
and they satisfied me . . . So, I immediately accepted that and let him
go and continued our search around the cars.

Malcolm Summers was one of the bystanders who followed police up
the Grassy Knoll immediately after the shooting. He told Jack Anderson:

I ran across Elm Street to run up there toward that knoll. And we were
stopped by a man in a suit and he had an overcoat over his arm. I saw a
gun under that overcoat. And his comment was, "Don't you'all come
up here any further, you could get shot . . . or killed . . . "

It has subsequently been asserted by the Secret Service that none of their
agents on duty that day were anywhere near Dealey Plaza either before or
just after the assassination.

In retrospect, Smith doubted the legitimacy of the man he encountered.
In 1963 Secret Service agents, like their FBI counterparts, wore crewcuts,
dark suits, and narrow ties.

Smith described the man thusly:

He looked like an auto mechanic. He had on a sports shirt and sports
pants. But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked
like auto mechanic's hands. And, afterwards, it didn't ring true for the
Secret Service. . . . At the time we were so pressed for time and we
were searching. And he had produced correct identification and we just
overlooked the thing. I should have checked the man closer, but at the
time, I didn't snap on it .. .

In addition to Smith and Summers, GI Gordon Arnold also encountered
a man who claimed to be with the Secret Service just moments prior to the
assassination. Arnold said he was walking behind the wooden picket fence
on top of the Grassy Knoll when he was approached by a man who told
him he was with the Secret Service and that Arnold could not stay behind
the fence. Moments later, Arnold said shots came from behind the fence.

Sam Holland, who was standing with two Dallas policemen and other
railroad workers on the Triple Underpass, told the Warren Commission
that "a plainclothes detective or FBI agent or something like that" was
helping the police guard the railroad bridge. Holland told a Commission attorney: ". .. there were two city policemen and one man in plainclothes. I didn't talk to him. I talked to the city policemen."

Holland said after hearing shots and seeing a white puff of smoke come
from behind the wooden picket fence, he and others ran to the Grassy
Knoll. He later said that while they found no one behind the picket fence:
". .. somebody had been standing there for a long period. I guess if you
could count them, about a hundred foot tracks [were] in that little spot, and
also mud on the bumper of [a] station wagon. "

Constable Seymour Weitzman, who had rushed behind the wooden
picket fence, met men he believed were Secret Service. Warren Commission lawyer Joseph Ball asked Weitzman if there were others with him
behind the fence. Weitzman replied:

Yes sir; other officers, Secret Service as well, and somebody started,
there was something red in the street and I went back over the wall and
somebody brought me a piece of what he thought to be a firecracker and
it turned out to be, I believe, I wouldn't quote this, but I turned it over
to one of the Secret Service men and I told them it should go to the lab
because it looked to me like human bone. I later found out it was
supposedly a portion of the President's skull.

It is not certain if this particular piece of bone was ever investigated by the
proper authorities. There is no mention of it in official reports, although
Commission Document 1269 is entitled "Location of Photos of a Bone
Specimen." This document, however, is still classified.

Dallas police sergeant D. V. Harkness also encountered Secret Service
men where none officially were supposed to be. Harkness told the Warren
Commission that he ran to the rear of the Texas School Book Depository
moments after the shooting and "there were some Secret Service agents
there." Harkness told a commission lawyer: "Didn't get them identified.
They told me they are Secret Service."

In later years Harkness told the Dallas Morning News that the men were
dressed in suits and "were all armed." He told the newspaper: "[I]
assumed they were with the Presidential party."

Dallas Secret Service agent-in-charge Forrest V. Sorrels was the only
Secret Service agent to return to the scene of the assassination within an
hour or so. Sorrels said he walked through a rear door of the Texas School
Book Depository without showing any identification. His arrival was too
late to have been that of one of the men encountered by Harkness.

In 1978, Sorrels, then retired, was asked by a Dallas newsman to
comment on the stories of bogus Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza.
Sorrels said: "[I'm] not answering any questions about this thing. I gave
all my testimony in Washington and I don't put out anything else. As far
as I'm concerned, that's a closed incident."

Another odd incident involving Secret Service agents who may have been bogus occurred within an hour of the assassination in the small town
of Ferris, located just south of Dallas. Two high-school students-Billy V.
James and Ronnie Witherspoon-witnessed a speeding car being stopped
by local police on Interstate 45. The students stopped to watch because
they thought "we may have been witnessing the arrest of the assassins. "
However, according to the students, the men in the stopped car told police
they were Secret Service agents "in a hurry to get to New Orleans to
investigate something in connection with the assassination." James said
the men were believed and allowed to goon without being ticketed.

No Secret Service agent reported leaving Dallas for New Orleans that
day and the identity of the men in the car remains a mystery.

Incredibly, even the accused assassin apparently had an encounter with
one of these bogus agents.

Secret Service inspector Thomas J. Kelley was one of the several
officials who interrogated Lee Harvey Oswald on the Sunday morning he
was shot by Ruby. In his report of that interview, Kelley wrote:

... [Oswald] asked me whether I was an FBI agent and I said that I
was not, that I was a member of the Secret Service. He said when he was
standing in front of the Textbook Building [Texas School Book Depository]
and about to leave it, a young, crew-cut man rushed up to him and said
he was from the Secret Service, showed a book of identification, and
asked him where the phone was. Oswald said he pointed toward the pay
phone in the building and that he saw the man actually go to the phone
before he left.

In later years, the theory was advanced that Oswald had merely mistaken a news reporter for an agent. Kelley's report dispels this notion.

In fact, when the sixth-floor museum of the assassination opened in
1989, a taped tour of the exhibit was narrated by newsman Pierce Allman,
who claimed to have been the reporter encountered by Oswald. However,
Allman apparently had no direct knowledge of this incident since he says
government agents told him months after the assassination that he had met
Oswald.

Considering the number of people claiming to have encountered agents
in Dealey Plaza, it appears that Oswald may well have been correct in his
identification of a secret Service agent.

It seems incredible that the suspected killer of the President not only
took the time to help someone he believed to be a Secret Service agent, but
then stood around to watch him get to the telephone.

But perhaps the strangest-and most ominous-incident involving the
Secret Service happened to witness Jean Hill. Jean Hill was standing
beside her friend Mary Moorman on the south side of Elm Street at the
moment Kennedy was killed. Moorman fell to the ground at the sound of
the shooting, but Hill remained standing and watchful.

After seeing both a man fire from behind the wooden picket fence and a
suspicious man rapidly walking west in front of the Depository, Hill ran
across Elm Street and began to run up the Grassy Knoll. Hill told this
author: "I don't know what I would have done if I had caught them, but I
knew something terrible had happened and somebody had to do something."

As she ran up the Grassy Knoll, her attention was drawn to a "trail of
blood in the grass just to the right of the steps." Thinking that "our guys
had shot back and we got one of them," she followed the red droplets until
she discovered they belonged to a Sno-cone-flavored ice packed in a cup.
Someone had dropped a red-colored one that day on the Grassy Knoll.

After the distraction of the Sno-cone, Hill continued her run up the
Grassy Knoll, but valuable seconds had been wasted. She looked in vain
for either the suspicious man behind the fence or the man she saw by the
Depository. She recalled: "All I saw in that parking area were railroad
workers and police."

Walking to the west of the Texas School Book Depository, Hill said she
encountered two men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents.
She told interviewers in Texas:

I was looking around but I couldn't see anything, when these two guys
came up behind me. One of them said, "You're coming with us," and I
replied, "Oh, no I'm not. I don't know you." "I said you're coming
with us," one of them said and then put this horrible grip on my
shoulder. I can still feel the pain when I think about it. I tried to tell
them, "I have to go back and find my friend Mary." But then the other
guy put a grip on my other shoulder and they began hustling me past the
front of the Depository. "Keep smiling and keep walking," one of them
kept telling me. They marched me across the plaza and into a building.
We entered from the south side and I think it was the sheriff's office.
They took me to a little office upstairs and they wouldn't let me out of
this room. It was all such a shock. There was a lot of tension and it was
like a lot of it was focused on this one area. The two men that grabbed
me never showed me any identification but, after we got to this little
room, some men came in who were Secret Service. They began to ask
me a lot of questions. One man told me they had been watching Mary
and I out of the window. He asked me, "Did you see a bullet hit at your
feet?" I told him I didn't realize that one had struck near my feet.
"Then, why did you jump back up on the curb?" he asked me and I
told him how I had started to run at the President's car but thought better
of it. Then I heard some booming sounds and it startled me and I
jumped back on the curb by Mary. I guess they were up there the whole
time and watched the whole thing. Then they sent those two guys to
come and get me. I mean, I wasn't too hard to find that day-wearing
that red raincoat.

Hill said she was kept in the room for some time before rejoining Mary
Moorman in a downstairs office. There were other assassination witnesses
in the office, such as Charles Brehm and others who signed sheriff's
depositions that day.

Hill said a Dallas newspaperman, whom the women at first believed to
be a federal agent, took all of the Moorman snapshots. Later that day the
photos were returned, but three of the six Moorman snapshots were taken
by federal authorities, who returned them only after several weeks. Two of
the returned photographs had the backgrounds mutilated.

Dallas police chief Jesse Curry summed up the import of a man with
Secret Service identification when he told author Anthony Summers:

.. . certainly the suspicion would point to the man as being involved,
some way or other, in the shooting, since he was in the area immediately adjacent to where the shots were-and the fact that he had a badge
that purported him to be Secret Service would make it seem all the more
suspicious.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations briefly looked into the
matter of men with Secret Service identification but came up with no real
answers.